In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  I had thought the love I felt for Albertine did not depend on any hope of physical intimacy. However, once that evening’s experience appeared to have ruled out all possibility of possessing her, once I had exchanged my initial certainty, acquired on the very first day down by the beach, that she was unchaste, and my various later notions of her, for the definitive conclusion that she was thoroughly virtuous, and when she said to me coldly a week later, having come back from her aunt’s, ‘I forgive you and I’m sorry if I was nasty to you, but you mustn’t ever do that again,’ what followed was quite the opposite of what had happened when Bloch first informed me that women were there for the having: as though I had been in love not with a real girl, but only a wax doll, it turned out that my desire to enter her life, to go with her to see the places where she had spent her childhood, to be initiated by her into the sporting life, gradually detached itself from her; my intellectual curiosity about what she might think on this or that subject did not outlast my belief that I might be able to kiss her. My dreams forsook her as soon as they ceased to be swayed by the hope of possessing her, which I had believed did not affect them. They were then free to recruit one or other of Albertine’s friends, if her charm impressed me on a particular day, and especially if I could see a possibility of being loved by her; and so I turned first towards Andrée. Yet, had Albertine not existed, I might not have taken the pleasure I took, more and more over the following days, in being the beneficiary of Andrée’s attentions. Albertine had told no one of my fiasco in her bedroom. She was one of those sorts of pretty girls who, from earliest youth, because of their beauty, or more usually a charm of manner or appearance, which remains something of a mystery and may lie in a fund of vitality in which those who are less favoured by nature find something refreshing, have always been better liked – whether within the family, among their friends or in the wider world – than others who are more richly endowed with beauty or fortune; she was one of those of whom, before attaining the age of love and even more so after, much more is demanded than they demand of themselves, much more too than they have it in them to give. Ever since childhood, Albertine had been surrounded by four or five admirers, little girls of her own age, one of whom, far superior to her and aware of it, was Andrée – it may even be that this attractiveness of Albertine’s, exercised by her quite unselfconsciously, had been one of the founding principles of the little gang. The influence of her attractiveness had been known to be felt far and wide, and even among people who were, relatively speaking, more exalted than her family: if, for instance, a pavane were to be danced, it was Albertine who was chosen rather than a girl of better family. A consequence of this was that, with no prospect of a dowry, and dependent as she was on M. Bontemps, who begrudged what she cost him, was said to be corrupt and would have been glad to have her off his hands, she was invited not only to dinner, but on week-end parties, by people who, though in Saint-Loup’s eyes they might have been beyond the pale of fashion, represented unattainable heights for the mothers of Rosemonde or Andrée, women who, despite being very wealthy, could not aspire to the acquaintance of such people. So it was that, every year, Albertine would spend several weeks with the family of a man who was on the board of governors of the Bank of France, the managing director of one of the larger railway companies. This financier’s wife was ‘at home’ to important people, yet had never mentioned her ‘day’ to Andrée’s mother, who, though she thought this impolite of the lady, was still prodigiously interested in everything that went on at her house. She too made a point of urging Andrée to invite Albertine down to their villa every year: it was, she said, a good deed, to enable a girl like that to enjoy a stay at the seaside, a girl who could never afford such a holiday and whose aunt neglected her. In this, Andrée’s mother was probably not motivated by the hope that the governor of the Bank of France and his wife, on learning that Albertine had been singled out by her and her daughter, would look kindly on them; nor could she have hoped that Albertine, for all her kind heart and astuteness, would be able to get an invitation, if not for herself, then at least for Andrée, to one of the financier’s garden-parties. However, each night at dinner, behind her pose of disdain and indifference, she was delighted to hear Albertine’s tales of what had taken place at the château during her stay there, and of the people who had been invited, most of whom she knew either by sight or by repute. Even the thought that she knew these people only in that way, that is knew them not at all (what she called having known people ‘for ever’), veiled Andrée’s mother’s mind with a faint melancholy, as she asked Albertine her stilted little questions about them in her haughty, off-handed way; and it might also have sown in her mind some faint doubt or a misgiving about the eminence of her own position in society, had she not reassured herself and returned to ‘living in the real world’ by saying to the butler, ‘Tell chef his peas are too hard.’ She went back then to being imperturbable. She was determined that Andrée should marry not just a man of excellent family (that went without saying), but one who was rich enough to allow her also to have a chef and two coachmen. This was a plain matter of fact, it was the simple truth of having a position. Yet the other fact, that Albertine had dined at the château of the governor of the Bank of France with Madame This or Madame That, and that one of these ladies had even invited the girl to be a house-guest the following winter, made Andrée’s mother see her as deserving of a certain esteem, which went quite well with the pity, not to say the contempt, inspired by her unfavourable circumstances, the contempt being sharpened by the knowledge that M. Bontemps had turned his coat and become a supporter of the government – there was even a suggestion that he might have been slightly tainted by the Panama Affair.116 Not that any of this prevented Andrée’s mother, who was a lover of truth, from also turning the withering fire of her disdain on any who appeared to believe that Albertine was of lowly origin. ‘Why, they’re top-drawer! They’re Simonets – with one n!’ It was true that, given the social stratum in which all this took place, where money plays such an important part, where position in the world may consist with issuing an invitation, but not with a proposal of marriage, Albertine could not assume that a practical outcome of the esteem in which she was held by people of some distinction would ever be a fashionable marriage, since such people could never overlook her lack of means. Nevertheless, her successes, even devoid of any hope of a matrimonial consequence, still roused the envy and fury of the mothers of other marriageable girls, who were exercised by the thought of Albertine being treated ‘like a daughter’ by the wife of the governor of the Bank, and even by Andrée’s mother, whom they hardly knew. So they took to telling mutual friends of theirs and these two ladies that the latter would be horrified if they but knew the truth: that they having been ill-advised enough to admit the girl to their family circle, she now regaled each of them with whatever she observed in the house of the other, retailing all sorts of tiny private matters which both of them would have been mightily distempered to have bruited abroad. In saying so, these envious ladies hoped it would eventually come to the ears of Albertine’s two patronesses, and cause a falling-out. However, as is often the case, these attempts failed in their object: the malice behind them was too undisguised; and the only result was that the ladies who had devised them attracted more dislike to themselves. The attitude of Andrée’s mother towards Albertine was too entrenched for her to change her view: though ‘an unfortunate’, the girl was gifted with great good-nature and took pains to be nice to people.

  Albertine’s general popularity, though it seemed unlikely to lead to any advantageous consequence, had ingrained in her the distinguishing characteristic of those who, by being always sought after, never need to make overtures (a trait which can be found, for similar reasons, in another remoter region of society, among the great ladies of the fashionable world), and who, rather than boasting of their successes, tend to conceal them. She would never have said of someone, ‘He’s dying to see me’; and she spoke of everybody with gr
eat good-will, giving the impression that she was the one seeking out others, trying to be liked by them. If one alluded to a young fellow who had just been cruelly berating her for not wishing to see him again, Albertine would sing his praises (‘Such a nice chap!’) instead of priding herself publicly on a conquest, or bearing him a grudge. In fact, she was put out by being so well liked, because it meant that she sometimes had to be unpleasant to people; whereas her natural inclination was to be pleasant. This inclination had even led her to adopt a form of lying, which is peculiar to people who like to be useful, or the type of man who has come up in the world. This mode of insincerity, which exists in embryo in a great many people, consists in the inability to be satisfied with the pleasure that can be given to a single person by a single act. If, for example, Albertine’s aunt required her attendance at a boring reception, she did not think that in the gratification she afforded her aunt by going to it there was enough moral benefit to herself. So her response to the kindly welcome of their hosts was to assure them that, having been looking forward to meeting them for a long time, she had begged her aunt to let her come on this occasion. Even this struck her as insufficient; and if she came across one of her friends at the reception, someone who had reason to be heartbroken, Albertine would say, ‘I didn’t like to think of you being on your own, so I thought you might like me to keep you company. Perhaps you’d prefer us to leave and go somewhere else? I’ll do whatever you like – I’d give anything for you not to be so sad’ (which was, of course, quite true). However, there were times when the fictitious purpose destroyed the real purpose: on one occasion, she called on a particular lady, with the intention of asking her to do a favour for a friend; but at the sight of this warm-hearted lady, Albertine, responding all unawares to her own principle of the multifarious usefulness of the single act, thought it would be nicer if she could appear to have had no other reason for visiting the lady than the enjoyment she expected from her company. The lady was extremely touched to think that Albertine had come such a long way on an impulse of simple friendship. Albertine, seeing how affected the lady was, responded with an even stronger fondness for her. The trouble was, though, that she was herself so keenly affected by the friendliness which she had falsely said was her reason for being there that she was reluctant to ask the favour for the friend, in case the lady should doubt the sincerity of her feelings (which were in fact quite sincere). The lady might believe that the favour was Albertine’s real reason for coming, which was true; but then she would assume that Albertine had no real pleasure in seeing her, which was untrue. The upshot was that Albertine would return home without having asked the favour, after the manner of those men who, having done a good turn to a woman in the hope of having their way with her, then keep their desire for her to themselves, so as to preserve a semblance of selflessness. On other occasions, it could not be said that the true purpose was sacrificed to the subsidiary one invented on the spur of the moment; but the real one was at such variance with the ostensible one that, had the person who was so touched by hearing the latter learned the former, all pleasure would instantly have been turned into a shock of mortification. Such contradictions will be clarified, eventually, by the rest of my story. They are, however, very prevalent, in even the most diverse circumstances of life, as can be shown by an example deriving from a very different order of experience. A married man brings his mistress down to live in the town where he is garrisoned. His wife, who is still in Paris, half-aware of how things stand, frets and broods, and pours her jealousy into letters to the husband. A moment comes when the mistress is obliged to go back to Paris for a day. Her lover finds her pleas that he should accompany her irresistible, and arranges to take twenty-four hours’ leave. Then, because he is a good-hearted fellow and is sorry for the pain he causes his wife, he goes round to see her and says, with the help of a few sincere tears, that her letters have so disturbed him that he managed to get away, so as to bring her consolation and a kiss. He has thus contrived, with a single journey, to prove his love both to the mistress and to the wife. But if the wife should find out the real reason why he came back to Paris, her joy would no doubt turn to pain, unless of course the pleasure of being with the miscreant should outweigh the sorrow of knowing him for a liar. One of the men who seemed to me to be most diligent in applying this principle of the plurality of purposes was M. de Norpois. He had been known to step in and act as an intermediary between two friends who had fallen out; and for this he was seen as the most obliging of men. But he was not satisfied just to seem to be helping out the one who had come to ask his advice: when speaking to the other party, he would present his intervention, not as resulting from a request by the first friend, but as being in the interest of the second; and this he had little difficulty in doing, faced with a man whose mind was already prepared to believe he was dealing with ‘the most helpful of men’. In this way, by hedging his bets, operating ‘against’ his client, as the parlance of the outside-brokers has it, he never jeopardized his influence; the services he rendered never had the effect of compromising his credit, but always of partly enriching it. Also, each of these services, seemingly doubly rendered, enhanced in that same measure his reputation as a dependable friend, and an effectively dependable friend at that, one whose aim is true, whose every stroke counts, as was attested by the gratitude of the two assisted parties. Such duplicity in obligingness (not unbelied at times, as in all human creatures) made up a significant element of the character of M. de Norpois. At the Ministry, he often made use of my father, who was rather a guileless man, while letting him think he was being of use to him.

  Being more popular than she would have liked, and having no need to trumpet her own triumphs, Albertine said nothing about our bedside scene, which a plainer girl might have wanted to share with the world. As for me, I could make no sense of the part she had played in it. My hypothesis about the thoroughness of her virtue (my initial explanation of the vehemence with which she refused to be kissed and possessed by me), though not indispensable to my conception of her fundamental goodness and integrity, had to be rethought and more than once reformulated. It was so diametrically opposite to the one I had formed on the day when I first set eyes on Albertine! Not only that, but the single act of brusque hostility, pulling the bell to thwart my designs, was set amid so many of her other acts, of a different sort, all of them well disposed towards me, whether affectionate or, as they sometimes were, anxious or alarmed, because of her jealousy at my liking for Andrée. So why had she invited me to spend the evening by her bedside? Why always speak the language of tenderness? What lies behind the desire to be with a friend, the fear that he might prefer one of your girl-friends, the intention to be nice to him, the romantic statement that none of the others will know he spent the evening with you, if you then refuse him such a straightforward pleasure, and if it is not in fact a pleasure for you? I could not accept that Albertine’s virtue stretched quite that far; and I even began to wonder whether her violent reaction might not have been prompted by some other reason, such as squeamishness (if she had suddenly noticed a bad smell about her person, and thought it might offend me), or timidity (if she believed, in her ignorance of the realities of love-making, that my state of nervous debility might somehow be contagious, contractable from a kiss).